Pages

Thursday, April 4, 2013

I hear one sentence over and over again
from people who find out I'm an artist: “I'm not creative.”

I call bullshit on this.

Painting and writing are the primary
tools I use to interpret the world. And we need to, sometimes.
Interpret the world. The moments we observe and allow the world to BE
as it is, those moments are beautiful. But a troubling question arose
in my heart in a journal entry from February: “Sometimes I'm afraid
I will always hang back and watch the beauty and wildness of life
through other people's eyes.”

Everyone is creative. Yes, I'm talking
to you. At a very basic level, we create ourselves as we live. You
know that paralyzing fear that occasionally grips us when we might,
just for a second, expose ourselves to someone else? The “You're
not good enough,” the “someone else does that better, why should
you bother,” the “I wish I could do that.” It might not even be
that obvious, that doubt can show up as our rabid consumption of
thoughts and art that other people have created. We do it all the
time. There's music, movies, art, yes, but it's also books
(nonfiction counts), lectures, our family and culture-- we interact
with ideas that are not ours daily and hourly. Some things we adopt,
some things we reject, but after a while this can become a habit. We
go grocery shopping for our opinions, our advice, our exercise
routines, the answers to life, the answer to how to be in
relationship with people. With ourselves.

Have you ever noticed that there are a
lot of conflicting ideas out there?

Imagine all of that, going on inside of
us. Everything we see, we hear, we experience, all that passes
through us. It bounces around, and either makes a home or passes on.
Beliefs, judgments, experiences, attitudes, states of mine. There is
an essence inside each one of us, and we spend a lifetime trying to
figure out how to express that essence and give it a voice.

That's the creative process, right
there. We do it unconsciously, and you don't have to be a painter or
writer to call it what it is.

Are you human?

Then you create.

That's literally what we do for a
living. We were given a spark of life, and then we were tossed out
into a wilderness and told: “Go on. Survive, live, and thrive. I
dare you.”

Somewhere in the middle of getting my
degree in art I realized that “art” wasn't the actual product I
ended up with. It wasn't the painting, it wasn't the poem. There's
that quote by Leonardo da Vinci that I love: “Art is never
finished, only abandoned.” The painting? That's just a byproduct of
art. The art itself is the process, just like the yoga is the
practice. The art is in the mistakes, the attempts, the questions,
the breakdowns, the breakthroughs.

We see this huge, expansive world
filled with millions of interpretations. Only one of those millions
is ours. It's easy, it's simple, and it's convenient to adopt one
from someone else and enjoy life from that perspective. But art is
never finished, only abandoned. So how many times to we abandon
ourselves?

The creative spark is a slow burn that
drives someone to continue looking, continue searching, because they
are never quite satisfied. That little hint of yearning, that little
ache. Let's go towards that, and make something beautiful together.

What is Twisting Open, Sinking In?

Often in yoga we are told that what we practice on the mat translates to our everyday life. Yet there are so many sensations and ideas that come up (and sometimes hit us on the head with a two-by-four), that we may not get the chance to really reflect and talk about how these experiences and changes manifest themselves in our lives. Just as we deepen our twists to open our hearts and sink deeper into the pose, Twisting Open, Sinking In aims to explore the experiences of the important practice we call Everyday Life.